Dr. James H. Simons is President of Renaissance Technologies Corp., a private investment firm dedicated to the use of mathematical methods. Renaissance presently has roughly $12 billion under management. Previously he was chairman of the Mathematics Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Earlier in his career he was a cryptanalyst at the Institute of Defense Analyses in Princeton, and taught mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Dr. Simons holds a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. His scientific research was in the area of geometry and topology. He received the American Mathematical Society Veblen Prize in Geometry in 1975 for work that involved a recasting of the subject of area minimizing multi-dimensional surfaces. A consequence was the settling of two classical questions, the Bernstein Conjecture and the Plateau Problem. Dr. Simons' most influential research involved the discovery and application of certain geometric measurements, now called the Chern - Simons Invarients, which have wide use, particularly in theoretical physics.

Dr. Simons is the founder and Chairman of Math for America, a nonprofit organization with a mission to significantly improve math education in our nation's public schools. He serves as Trustee of Brookhaven National Laboratory, The Institute for Advanced Study, The Rockefeller University, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He is also a member of the Board of the MIT Corporation and Chair Emeritus of the Stony Brook Foundation. Together with his wife, Marilyn, Dr. Simons manages the Simons Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to scientific research.

Dr. Simons is 68 years old and lives in Manhattan with his wife and his daughter, Audrey. His older children, Liz and Nathaniel, live respectively in Palo Alto, California and Berkeley, California.